Krauthammer: Obama Like James Buchanan In Terror Fight

16 Feb 2015

Columnist Charles Krauthammer compared President Obama’s handling of the war on terror to James Buchanan before the Civil War on Monday’s “O’Reilly Factor” on the Fox News Channel.

“Well, he’s [Obama] told us, he told us in the Vox interview about a week ago. This is not a year ago, this is not two years ago. This is–I mean directly after the savage immolation of the Jordanian pilot. He said that the terrorism threat is over-hyped. It’s like the local news, if it bleeds it leads, it’s a media phenomenon and then he said that this fight, what we call the war on terror, is really like a big city mayor trying to control crime. Which means his heart isn’t in it, no mayor of a city images he’s ever going to wipe out crime, there’s always crime…so he thinks it’s something to be managed, and that it is being hyped by people who are either hysterical, who don’t understand this, or who want to get us into bigger wars. He is the James Buchanan, and he’s not going to be dissuaded from that” Krauthammer stated.

Krauthammer added that the AUMF before Congress was the president “trying to give the impression of action, an imitation of motion. He’s trying to do anything except carry the fight. So, what does he do? He’s now going to involve us in weeks and weeks of debate in the Congress with a resolution that is designed to hamper any effort against ISIS.”

He continued “Obama knows this, he’s rather cynical about this. He doesn’t really care which way the resolution comes out. But, it will take up the oxygen for a couple of weeks, a couple of months, maybe half a year, and he’s already told us, in the same speech, he said, he already has the necessary authority to do anything he needs to do from the original resolution of 2001…it’s just a way to distract attention from the fact that he is not willing to make this a serious campaign.”

Krauthammer concluded “it’s not just that he’s not going to go into Syria, he’s not even willing to do the containment in Iraq…this is a man who does not want to prosecute this war.”